ALT-3 Transportation and Safety
The railroad transports a great deal of goods across the country. What a lot of people don't know is that much of that freight is still moved by truck. This is known as intermodal freight. The way it works is a trucking company picks up an empty trailer or container on a chassis at a railroad terminal and takes it to the shipper. The shipper loads their freight and the equipment is then returned to the railroad for the longer distance of the move. They load it on a flatcar and it is transported via rail to the nearest railroad terminal to the company that is receiving the goods. It then takes another trucking company at that end to pick up the trailer or container on chassis and deliver it then return the empty back to the rail. The trucking companies that do this service are called draymen.
What most people also do not realize is the railroad does not actually own the containers and trailers it puts on the road. Not only that but the people they lease the equipment from actually hold the drayman responsible for the condition of the equipment even though they have it for only a relatively short time and only for a relatively short distance. As a result there are hundreds if not thousands of unsafe trailers and containers on the highways of America every day. Are the trucking companies at fault? The truck driver? The railroads?
Currently the only one held responsible is the trucker. How can they afford to buy tires or make repairs on equipment they don't own? They can easily spend hundreds on repairs for a shipment they make only tens of dollars on and never get reimbursed for any of it. Yet the railroad and leasing companies feel they are not responsible. Trucking draymen put used tires or skip needed repairs to save a loss and the railroad in turn does not do desperately needed repairs to their decrepit equipment. As they pass the buck down the logistics chain who is suffers? How many of the fatalities on our highways are due to this substandard equipment? When is the Department of Transportation going to hold the owners of the equipment responsible?
